Since 2011, we’ve been helping companies and universities take a fresh approach to market trade missions, shows and study visits: planning for sales, stimulating innovation, drawing out and capturing learning, to promote thought-leadership inside and outside the organisation.

During nearly a decade research across Europe, it was eye-watering to discover just how many companies fail to plan and follow-up effectively on what are quite significant costs.

As they strove to develop new markets, some didn’t even bother to calculate the return on their investment. We discovered that many companies don’t set objectives before travelling — in spite of spending tens of thousands — and fail to promote their attendance or even set up meetings in advance. By the time they return, they’ve forgotten many of their valuable insights and the people they met. Consequently, much of their learning doesn’t even get shared with their teams, let alone implemented.

As well as planning and support, we were able to help them discover how these ventures can deliver far more value than vague hopes of distant sales — including by capturing insights and promoting thought-leadership.

Delegates on our programmes worked with thought-leaders in audience engagement from across the European media and audiovisual industries, and experimented with ways to apply these to festivals, expos and market visits — capturing and promoting their insights using professional and everyday technology such as cameraphones.

To make this happen, Contented developed and led a consortium of higher education and SME partners across Europe including: University of Wolverhampton, Birmingham City University, Ravensbourne (London); FutureMedia and Film New Europe (Warsaw); EastDocs and OneWorld (Prague); Geopoly (Sofia), Era Film (Vilnius), Vertical Emotions and Active Earth (Barcelona)

We worked with trade missions led by Department of International Trade, and a range of tradeshows and conferences including WatchDocs, One World, Global Editors Network, Lit Expo, ADBA, Edie, Smart City Expos, Utility Week, and Automechnika.

Congratulations to all our community of collaborators — clients, partners, delegates, advisors and other supporters. Details of the service project are available at https://contented.net/ontente